Could KiwiSaver be Budget’s big play?

The government heads into tomorrow’s Budget with less room to move than it had hoped, Hayden Wilson, chair of law firm Dentons NZ, told Herald NOW Business. The Iran war is forcing a conservative, fiscally restrained Budget rather than the voter-friendly one some may have envisaged for an election year. Wilson says while the budget will be restrained, superannuation could be a sweetener: “If you can do something in KiwiSaver that people look at and go, ‘that will make this a better place for my children’, that’s a really effective political strategy.” He points to speculation around a KiwiSaver scheme modelled on baby bonus accounts as a bold option that, while a significant commitment at roughly $300 million a year, would be one a future government would struggle to reverse.